There's no end of opinions in the java/closure debates.  Everyone who has half a notion of what's going on (and many who don't) has their own opinion on how closures should be implemented.  My imaginary friend Dave is no different with his Dumb Closures idea.  It looks like BGGA is going to win the day but I really wish this proposal would get a closer look.  I'm not a language lawyer by any stretch and there might be a million holes and subtleties I'm missing, but this looks like a half decent idea. The syntax is a million times simpler than others I've seen and doesn't seem to need any of the syntactic and bytecode gymnastics needed by other proposals.  In fact, it seems to need very little of either.  Dave's idea doesn't support the notion of named or typed closures so you can't stuff them in a List to be executed later.  I'm actually OK with that because I think interfaces are a better solution in almost all cases there.  This syntax, however, is very, very clean and doesn't bring the "wtf" factor that the other proposals bring.

So to all you who actually know what you're talking about in regards to closures, what do you think?  What am I missing?

Ant 1.7.0 was released way back in December 2006. Since then, there hasn't been a single update. Not even a maintenance release. Now, ant is a relatively mature product. It's been out a while and is quite stable. But it's certainly not bug free. There's not a lot of activity in the repository apart from the addition of ivy but after that went in activity dropped almost off the chart. I really do like ant despite my desire to see something else. But I fear that with the rising interest in maven, ant development has trailed off. And, to be clear, I despise maven. So, does any one know? The mailing lists at least show activity. Why no releases?